front cover of Apostate Englishman
Apostate Englishman
Grey Owl the Writer and the Myths
Albert Braz
University of Manitoba Press, 2015

front cover of For Love of the World
For Love of the World
Essays on Nature Writers
Sherman Paul
University of Iowa Press, 1992
Along with poets, philosophers, and deep ecologists, nature writers—who may be something of all three—address the world alienation of Western civilization. By example as well as with words, they teach us to turn from the self to the world, from ego to ecos.In these deeply felt meditative essays, Sherman Paul contemplates the cosmological homecoming of nature writers who show us how to reenter the world, participate in it, and recover respect for it.
In For Love of the World Sherman Paul considers Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, major writers in the American tradition of nature writing; Henry Beston and Loren Eiseley, writers not yet so canonical; and Richard Nelson and Barry Lopez, our estimable contemporaries.
Paul's meditative mode follows the practice of naturalists who enter the field, come into the open, and relate their immediate experiences. In the most primary and direct way, his essays belong to our moment in history when nothing is more essential than our reattachment to earthly existence. They will reawaken our love of the world—the necessary eros of ecos—and our wonder at and gratitude for being.
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front cover of North Writers II
North Writers II
Our Place in the Woods
John Henricksson
University of Minnesota Press, 1997

front cover of The Poetics of Natural History
The Poetics of Natural History
Christoph Irmscher
Rutgers University Press, 2019
Winner of the 2000 American Studies Network Prize and the Literature and Language Award from the Association of American Publishers, Inc.

Early American naturalists assembled dazzling collections of native flora and fauna, from John Bartram’s botanical garden in Philadelphia and the artful display of animals in Charles Willson Peale’s museum to P. T. Barnum’s American Museum, infamously characterized by Henry James as “halls of humbug.” Yet physical collections were only one of the myriad ways that these naturalists captured, catalogued, and commemorated America’s rich biodiversity. They also turned to writing and art, from John Edward Holbrook’s forays into the fascinating world of herpetology to John James Audubon’s masterful portraits of American birds.
 
In this groundbreaking, now classic book, Christoph Irmscher argues that early American natural historians developed a distinctly poetic sensibility that allowed them to imagine themselves as part of, and not apart from, their environment. He also demonstrates what happens to such inclusiveness in the hands of Harvard scientist-turned Amazonian explorer Louis Agassiz, whose racist pseudoscience appalled his student William James. 
 
This expanded, full-color edition of The Poetics of Natural History features a preface and art from award-winning artist Rosamond Purcell and invites the reader to be fully immersed in an era when the boundaries between literature, art, and science became fluid.
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front cover of The Poetics of Natural History
The Poetics of Natural History
From John Bartram to William James
Irmscher, Christoph
Rutgers University Press, 1999

The Poetics of Natural History is about the “daydreams” of early American naturalists (from 1730 to 1868) and the collections they created around these dreams. Christoph Irmscher explores how, through the acts of organizing physical artifacts and reflecting upon their collections through writings and images, naturalists from John Bartram to Louis Agassiz were making sense of themselves and their world. These collections allowed them, in a way, to collect themselves.

In the first part of his book, Irmscher offers us a guided tour of the actual collections, beginning in Bartram’s disorderly botanical garden in Philadelphia and taking us through the artful display of animals in Charles Wilson Peale’s collections and, finally, to the “halls of humbug” of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum. The second part of the book moves away from the collections, and explores natural history words and images. Irmscher unforgettably describes American collectors’ fascination and horror with the American rattlesnake, and invokes the violent and beautiful world of American birds as described in John James Audubon’s paintings and writings.  His book ends with a description of Louis Agassiz’s 1865 expedition to Brazil as seen through the eyes of the young William James, who reluctantly gathered Brazilian fish while his mentor assembled “proof” that some human beings were less human than others.

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front cover of Reader Of The Purple Sage
Reader Of The Purple Sage
Essays On Western Writers And Environmental Literature
Ann Ronald
University of Nevada Press, 2003

Literary scholar Ann Ronald gathers her most notable published essays about Nevada, environmental writing, and Western American literature in one volume. These essays reflect Ronald’s wide-ranging interests. Here are deeply informed, critical essays on writers as diverse as Zane Gray, Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and Terry Tempest Williams, as well as the Tonopah Ladies—a group of literary women who found their voices in the unlikely setting of a mining boomtown—and on such varied topics as the image of Reno in nineteenth- and twentieth-century fiction. Included are several recent essays in which Ronald thoughtfully discusses the burgeoning field of environmental writing, some of its principal themes and concerns, and its best-known practitioners.

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front cover of Writing Natural History
Writing Natural History
Dialogue with Authors
Edward Lueders
University of Utah Press, 1989

Writing Natural History is the edited record of four public dialogues held at the University of Utah in 1988 between eminent writers in the fields of natural history. In these interchanges the writers discussed their traditions, perspectives, values, purposes, techniques, and personal insights. Their conversations, like their work, link the sciences with the humanities in surprising ways, enhancing our understanding and appreciation of both. This volume maintains the vitality of the spoken dialogues and conveys a lively sense of each speaker’s concern with the processes of the natural world and our human position in it.

Half of the authors began as professionals in the natural sciences before becoming recognized for their literary skills; the other half are established writers whose works reflect their vital human affinity with and respect for nature. Writing Natural History will appeal to all readers involved in conservation, nature study, creative writing, environmental issues, the natural sciences, the outdoors, and the ecological politics of Earth.

Authors dialogues feature Barry Lopez and Edward O. Wilson, Robert Finch and Terry Tempest Williams, Gary Paul Nabhan and Ann Zwinger, Paul Brooks and Edward Lueders.

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